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Sankar Chatterjee, curator of paleontology at the Museum of Texas Tech, says the meteorite
strike near present-day Mumbai, India, could be responsible for the massive dinosaur
extinction 65 million years ago.

Imagine a meteorite more than 25 miles wide hurtling toward Earth at 36,000 miles
per hour. The impact would create mass extinctions, perpetual night for more than
a year, tsunamis and massive volcanic activity.

It’s not a fictional plot to some Hollywood disaster movie, says Sankar Chatterjee,
curator of paleontology at the Museum of Texas Tech University. In fact, the exact
scenario played out 65 million years ago near present-day Mumbai, India, and could
be the smoking gun that ended the dinosaurs’ reign on Earth.

Chatterjee and his colleagues recently published further evidence about the Indian
meteorite impact site known as the Shiva Crater and aptly named for the Hindu god
of destruction. He presented his findings at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Geological
Society of America in Portland, Ore.

Though many scientists attributed the dinosaur extinction to the Chicxulub Crater
off the coast of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, Princeton University scientists recently
refuted this theory because evidence showed that meteor struck 300,000 years before
the demise of dinosaurs.

Chatterjee said the Shiva evidence suggests the meteorite struck at the same time
as the mass extinction and created enough catastrophic force to destroy 70 percent
of Earth’s plant and animal communities on land and in the seas.

A Decade of Research

Chatterjee conducted a 10-year study using geophysical evidence and core samples collected
by oil companies to reconstruct the Shiva Crater – a massive 300-mile-wide pock mark
with a 3-mile peak as high as Mount McKinley. Though the actual crater is covered
by more than five miles of sediment, Chatterjee says the geological evidence he collected
allowed him to map out the crater.

It's hard to imagine such a cataclysm. But if the team is right, the Shiva impact
vaporized Earth’s crust at the point of collision, leaving nothing but ultra-hot mantle
material to well up in its place. The impact appears to have sheared or destroyed
much of the 30-mile-thick granite layer in the western coast of India.

“Rocks from the bottom of the crater give us the telltale sign of the impact event
from shattered and melted target rocks,” he said. “We want to see if there are breccias,
shocked quartz, and an iridium anomaly. Asteroids are rich in iridium, and such anomalies
are thought of as the fingerprint of an impact.”

It is likely that the strike enhanced the nearby Deccan Traps volcanic eruptions that
covered much of Western India. This activity resulted in half a million cubic miles
of lava flooding the western part of India in a short amount of time. The greatest
lava event coincides with the meteorite.

What's more, the impact broke the Seychelles islands off of the Indian tectonic plate,
and sent them drifting toward Africa.

“The Shiva impact made the western coast of India seismically active and caused the
plate movement separating India from the Seychelles islands,” Chatterjee said, adding
that the meteorite probably led to the sudden northward acceleration of the Indian
plate, then a continent located south of the equator, to collide with Asia and form
the Himalayas.

“The Shiva projectile was about 25 miles across,” Chatterjee said. “With a meteorite
of this magnitude, it would create a huge crater as soon as it hit the surface. Rocks
would be vaporized and send dust and debris into the air that would block out the
sun.”

More Powerful than the World’s Nuclear Arsenal

The fallout from the meteorite, which Chatterjee calculated to have 10,000 times more
force than the detonation of the world’s entire nuclear arsenal, would place the world
into perpetual night for more than a year. Red-hot rock would rain from the skies,
sparking massive global forest fires and causing acid rain that would kill shelled
organisms in the oceans and cause massive collapse of the food chain.

“Anything bigger than 25 pounds was wiped out,” he says. “Animals that lived in the
river water, such as crocodiles and alligators, survived, but most animals on land
and in the oceans were the main victims.”